Monthly Archives: April 2013

Unscrambling Libertarian Scripts

Feminism, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, libertarianism, Liberty, Paleolibertarianism, Politics, Ron Paul

Here I answer my pal Myron Pauli, who, while a fierce individualist, all too often falls into the blasé libertarian, collective group-think, whereby only Ron Paul escapes blame for his imperfections (such as the incessant noodling about Congress’s need to declare war—as if the imprimatur of cockroaches turns unjust wars into just ones—or calling a focus on immigration in tough economic times a function of xenophobia; cleaving to the left’s tack on so-called endemic racism, being a career politician, on and on).

Myron’s Facebook comment below is a response to this week’s WND column, where I very specifically home in on Maggie Thatcher’s manifest individualism and cerebral acuity, not her policies.

Writes Myron Robert Pauli:

As a libertarian nerd, I will often claim that the most beneficial people are often anonymous innovators who come up with a medical or device breakthrough to benefit the world (who invented the thermostat?)…. – on the other hand, politicians are mostly parasitic – the best benign politicians like Thatcher are the ones who foil the MALIGNANT designs of the Footes, Galtieris, and Brezhnevs. Hence, she was a Giantess in a field of pygmies (of course, she might have accomplished more had she stayed in chemistry or took over her father’s store- a great lady nonetheless).

MY REPLY: Thatcher was no pigmy, however which way you slice it. Be it in her role in a laboratory, bringing us one step closer to the delights of soft-serve ice-cream (the left denies her involvement, naturally), or smashing the unions and keeping the England she loved out of the EU.

You are repeating the usual libertarian echo chamber/mantra: Apply a single analysis to each politician other than Ron Paul, of course, whose every indiscretion is ignored, and every endeavor, even parasitic, is elevated.

The independent, unaffiliated writer should fight for intellectual virtue against the Idicoracy and the mediocrity. Without those intellectual standards, there can be no liberty. For those attributes, Mrs Thatcher is to be lauded. It is careless to dismiss these gifts of hers so rare in the populace and the people, for these attributes were enormously influential at the time.

Pundit-cum-philospher Jack Kerwick once observed how virtually impossible it is to reduce the size of the state. As a practical matter, it is well-nigh impossible to choke the modern, Western managerial state without a coup, or without shedding blood, as Thomas Jefferson advised.

Let’s see the brave theoreticians, confined to their safe theoretical perimeters, waffling into the ether, accomplish what Mrs. Thatcher accomplished: smash the unions, defend Britain from Brussels, privatize so many of Britain’s Sovietized industries, prohibit subsidies to industry, on and on.

Was she flawed? Most assuredly. (As a longtime antiwar libertarian, I’d be the first to say so.) But even more flawed are those who dismiss her with the pat libertarian analysis of, “Oh, she didn’t achieve a market anarchy. I can go back to snoozing, rather than apply my intellect to an assessment of what she did do.”

More crucially, and that was the focus of “Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist”: Any woman who thought and spoke as she did is inspiring because so rare and getting rarer by the day.

“Big hair, an overbite, Botox and mind-numbing banalities”: that’s the contemporary role model of womanhood that infests TV.

Updates to the original Margaret Thatcher blog post are here.

Easy Money, Soaring Stocks & A Stagnant Economy

Business, Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, Middle East

Some in mainstream media are making good progress in connecting Ben Bernanke’s non-stop monetary stimulus to a rise in all prices, stock-market prices included.

The Fed’s monthly confetti of funny-money stands at “$85 billion total every month.” The Fed’s balance sheet reflects “more than $3 trillion.”

The Fed, explains Elizabeth MacDonald (Fox Business News), purchases mortgage-backed and Treasury securities from Fed dealers.”

You can see how hooked the market is to the central bank’s money printing — the correlation in fact is rather astonishing. It shows the government and the central bank’s power to create money, manipulate market prices, and transfer wealth. The market is powered ahead by a growing strength in corporate profits, too.

Richard Fisher, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, is more than hip to the “monetary Ritalin” scam:

…And, for some, there is a deeply imbedded worry that the Fed’s contortion of the yield curve and cost of money cannot last forever, or, if it lasts too long, will eventually result in financial bubbles and/or uncontrollable inflation, adding another uncertainty to the plethora of uncertain factors that already plague them. “Credit is super-abundant and stock market behavior is conditioned not so much by the fundamental performance of its underlying companies but by increasing doses of monetary Ritalin.

Then again, if you listen to the likes of Shepard Smith (also on Fox News) or Brooke Baldwin (CNN) expatiate on the topic of a stagnant economy against the backdrop of soaring stocks—you’ll hear their extra curricula exhortation for The Ben Bernanke to keep those interest rates low. Lovely!

UPDATE III: Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist (Republican Teletwits R Feminists)

Britain, EU, Europe, Feminism, Human Accomplishment, Individualism Vs. Collectivism, Intellectualism, Intelligence, Reason

“Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist” is the new column, now on WND. Here is an excerpt. Read the rest on WND:

“Feminism is a form of collectivism. The sludge of feminist thought was as foreign to Margaret Thatcher’s supple mind as originality is in the collective consciousness of Dana Perino and Kimberly Guilfoyle.

Big hair, an overbite, botox and mind-numbing banalities: These best describe the female hosts on Fox News’ ‘The Five,’ a current-affairs panel, on which Lady Thatcher’s achievements were being claimed for womanhood.

To be fair to the pair from ‘The Five,’ a procession of equally vacuous panelists, plonked on other God-awful, dual-perspective chat forums—now multiplying on TV—had all rattled on about Margaret Thatcher qua woman.

The solipsistic sorority known as feminism was alien to Mrs. Thatcher, who was a methodological individualist, if ever there was one. The ‘Iron Lady’ would have had nothing but contempt for the mediocrities claiming her achievements for their communal sisterhood.

The causes of the late Mrs. Thatcher—who served as the United Kingdom’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990, and passed away this week—were those of “individual men and women” and their families.

As Lady Thatcher famously averred, feminism was poison. ‘No! No! No!’ The Lady was not for feminism. Within parliament, Prime Minister Thatcher had disavowed “little sir echo’s” acquiescence to the colossal collective of the European superstate. From without parliament, she would have extended the same scorn to little miss echo’s campaigns for gender-driven sectional interests.

The force of Mrs. Thatcher’s thinking and leadership flowed from a fierce independence of mind that precluded an affinity for the black hole of feminist thought—the collapse of which becomes increasingly likely as its center of gravity grows heavier. (Yes, women—especially feminists—risk vanishing into self-centeredness and self-preoccupation.) A bona fide feminist at the Guardian got it right. Mrs. Thatcher, she fumed, had no empathy for woman-centric whining, preferring the company of men.

Such was Lady Thatcher’s individualism that she even hand-bagged Thomas Jefferson for what she perceived as his flawed expression of the American Mind …”

The complete column, “Margaret Thatcher: An Individualist, Not A Feminist,” is on WND.

If you’d like to feature this column, WND’s longest-standing, exclusive paleolibertarian column, in or on your publication (paper or pixels), contact ilana@ilanamercer.com.

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UPDATE I: No To The EU. It says a lot about collectivism’s historic, unstoppable momentum that Margaret Thatcher was ousted as prime minister of Britain, in 1990, because of one of her most prophetic and patriotic insights: that against the European superstate. She famously insisted that, “We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at a European level, with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

UPDATE II: Libertarians will and should continue to debate whether Margaret Thatcher truly reduced overall government outlays. While economic growth outpaced government growth during the Thatcher years, as The Spectator’s Jonathan Jones observed, “Government spending actually rose by 17.6 percent in real terms under Thatcher.”
We might, in addition to all else, ponder why, given the privatization Thatcher accomplished—National Freight, steel, gas, telecoms and water—Mrs. Thatcher failed to tackle Britain’s National Health Service. Alas, there is so much one woman can do. To ignore her towering intellect and her patriotism, so unusual today among the Anglo-American traitor class, is worse than stupid.

UPDATE III: “Milton on Maggie.”

UPDATE IV (4/12): The Republican Teletwits are Feminists. Jeff P writes:

Ilana,
Very well written piece capturing so many of the essentials of Lady Thatcher. However as regards the two ladies of The Five, I didn’t at all sense that they were/are leftist feminist supporters and am of the belief or at least the impression that they would agree with your statements about Lady Thatcher vs liberal feminism. I do want to tell you however, that I believe you do the quality of your essay a disservice with the ad hominems of “botox, big hair, and overbite.” I think it is within bounds to draw the analogy of the feminist sludge to Thatcher’s supple mind as originality to the collective consciousness of Perino and Guilfoyle. Just my thoughts.

Sincerely,
Jeff P.

Reply:

Dear J.,

Never said they were leftist; but they are neocon-Republican feminists. Which, I suppose, is left, in my book. All Republican TV tarts (bar Malkin and Coulter who are serious commentators, but are not invited on panels b/c too smart for their hosts) are feminist lightweights. Think about what individualism versus feminism involves. The constructs deployed by the many Dana Perinos and Kimberly Guilfoyles, festooning panels all over the networks, are invariably gender-centric.
The two were incapable of addressing Mrs. Thatcher’s thinking, other than to chirp on about her contribution to making them feel better as women; brightening their prospects as females. Well, she should not have, because Mrs. Thatcher was nothing like them.
In any case, their discourse is feminist, not individualist.
As to the bite. Writing has to be biting and sharp, not boring and agreeable. If you back up the bite with facts, and I do my best—then one should have some fun. Those two broads are thick. Why are they there speaking to the nation? Why are all these panels bedecked with such silly sorts? Because these women will never say anything remotely provocative or original. Never have, never will.

Here is another one.

Some Economic Fundamentals

Barack Obama, Business, Debt, Economy, Inflation

Against the backdrop of the White House’s budget, a “$3.778 trillion spending plan for the year that begins in October, which called for about $1 trillion in tax increases over 10 years and higher spending on programs such as education, transportation and mental-health services” (WSJ), consider the following:

* “The top 1 percent of Americans in income pays 37 percent of all income taxes. The top half of wage earners pays 98 percent of all income taxes” (Pat Buchanan).

* “9 million Americans ages 20 to 64 years old – nearly 5 percent of the working-age population – is receiving disability pay (Pat Buchanan). 81,000 Americans went on disability just last month. The government is spending $260 billion a year on disability programs, more than it spends on food stamps and welfare combined (Lou Dobbs).

* 47.8 million Americans receive food stamps, “at a cost of $80 billion” (Pat Buchanan). The percentage of Americans on food stamps has risen by 70 percent since 2008.

* 90 million Americans have dropped out of the labor force (Here).

* 50 million Americans are living below the poverty line (Lou Dobbs).

* And who can forget the national debt? It’s $16.8 trillion.